“To Serve & Protect” Whom? Alec Karakatsanis on Copaganda (re-broadcast)

Sea Change Radio

What comes to mind when you hear the words “crime” and “safety?” For many, these words evoke images of poor people stealing things, or police enforcing laws to suppress street crime. Our guest today on Sea Change Radio argues that there’s a whole set of crimes that have been intentionally omitted from the messaging we get and that, for many, “police” and “safety” are far from synonymous. This week we speak with Alec Karakatsanis, the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. A former public defender and the author of “Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System,” Karakatsanis believes that much of our country’s perspective on crime and policing has been shaped by “copaganda,” the swaying of public opinion for the benefit of law enforcement. We look at the corrosive societal effects of historic and current police practices, examine how and why these wrongheaded approaches persist, and discuss the complicity of journalists and policymakers who fall for and then perpetuate the American mythology of crime and safety. 00:01 Narrator - This is Sea Change Radio, covering the shift to sustainability. I'm Alex Wise. 00:20 Alec Karakatsanis (AK) - If you everyday on the news see a story of someone shoplifting from a pharmacy but you never hear a story about that pharmacy stealing from its own workers, then you're going to think that the shoplifting is a more of a problem than wage theft. Even though the exactly the opposite is true. And there are different kinds of problems, right? And there are different kinds of solutions. 00:00:44 Narrator - What comes to mind when you hear the words "crime" and "safety?" For many, these words evoke images of poor people stealing things, or police enforcing laws to suppress street crime. Our guest today on Sea Change Radio argues that there's a whole set of crimes that have been intentionally omitted from the messaging we get and that, for many, "police" and "safety" are far from synonymous. This week we speak with Alec Karakatsanis, the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. A former public defender and the author of “Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice System,” Karakatsanis believes that much of our country’s perspective on crime and policing has been shaped by "copaganda," the swaying of public opinion for the benefit of law enforcement. We look at the corrosive societal effects of historic and current police practices, examine how and why these wrongheaded approaches persist, and discuss the complicity of journalists and policymakers who fall for and then perpetuate the American mythology of crime and safety. 02:05 Alex Wise (AW) - I'm joined now on Sea Change Radio by Alec Karakatsanis. He is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps. Alec, welcome to Sea Change Radio. 02:14 Alec Karakatsanis (AK) - Thank you for having me. 02:16 AW So you have a newsletter entitled Copaganda, Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter. Why don't you define copaganda for us? 02:24 AK - I think there are a lot of ways to understand what copaganda is, so I don't purport to have the definitive understanding of the term, but essentially what it reflects is the way in which a very special kind of propaganda is weaponized by powerful interests in government, in the corporate world and the media. To change the way we think about public safety, change that we think about the criminal punishment bureaucracy and the way we think about police, prosecutors, judges, courts, jails, prisons, probation officers, and I think it really serves 3 main roles. Rule #1: copaganda tends to narrow our conception of safety and what safety means to a very small subset of the many different kinds of threats that there are to public safety. So for example, copaganda and the media tends to focus on low level criminal activity, typically by the poor, and to ignore large scale. Criminal activity by more powerful interests like wage ...